While the world is still holding out for some stills of Glenn Close and Michael Rooker in James Gunn's madder-than-a-bag-of-hydrospanners Marvel space opera Guardians Of The Galaxy, these very handsome photos of their two very handsome co-stars Karen Gillan and Chris Pratt will do very nicely as a stop-gap. Gillian is the blue bald one. Pratt is the rugged Indiana Jones type.

Gillan plays one of the antagonists of the piece, an alien called Nebula, with Gillan calling her character “unapologetically so mean. She gets such an enjoyment from what she does, and what she does is so bad. It really, really helps to change so drastically physically. I feel like people were slightly more intimidated by me.”

With Marvel gambling that less comic book-savvy audiences have been primed by Thor and the rest to accept more out-there concepts, Guardians sends us hurtling into deep space to meet a very different gang of (anti)heroes. The leader of the group is Pratt's Peter Quill (who would rather everyone called him Star-Lord), taken from Earth at age nine and in possession of a mysterious McGuffin orb (seen above). He’s grown up into a cheeky, daring adult who pilots a ship called the Milano.